In the Limelight - Patsy Cline

Graham Dixon

Published 4:21 am, Wednesday, September 19, 2012

It is a strange, sad fact that talented musicians often die young. Stranger and sadder, they tend to die in two distinct ways — plane crashes and drug overdoses. Their lives are cut short, like master tape spliced in the studio, in the pre-digital days at least. Any retrospective of such musicians has an inevitable sense of melancholy, of the doom that our knowledge brings, and of the precious innocence that the musicians and those that loved them possessed in the time before the wings crumpled, the syringe filled for the last time.

“A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline,” playing at Midland Community Theatre through Saturday, is imbued with this sense of beautiful tragedy. Phenomenally simple in concept — a DJ presenting a retrospective of Cline which ends just minutes before the announcement of her death — the show requires the audience to fill in the blanks in an unusual, ultimately successful way.

In the title role, Patrice Compton looks uncannily like Cline and reproduces her performances in an imaginative, intelligent fashion. Rather than just singing numbers, she creates a character that develops and changes. So in the opening songs Cline seems a little unsure of herself and nervous, as her understated act — which often involved standing a little awkwardly and simply singing — had yet to fully mature.

But soon she finds her full voice, and is movingly powerful in “Faded Love.” Compton captures Cline’s slightly self-conscious demeanor when wearing that rather bizarrely exaggerated Western costume, and then the growing depth and artistry she exhibited at Carnegie Hall. All these changes are aided by creative and effective scene, costume and lighting changes. We progress from one performing space to another subtly and yet completely. Director Tim Jebsen, scenic/lighting designer Edward Taylor and costume designer Micheal Waid obviously worked very closely together and the results are lovely.

Near the end of the show Compton wears a black dress, much more sophisticated than the previously showy costumes — and delicate acting and blocking spreads foretasted doom through the theater. Cline forecast her premature demise years before it occurred and had essentially started letting go of the world through her increasingly spiritual music. There is something undoubtedly spooky about this process, one that Jebsen creates through some intricate character development with Compton.

Compton is great in both the more intimate numbers, such as when she interacts with the audience in “She’s Got You,” and yet also in those numbers — “I Fall to Pieces,” “Crazy” — in which she is portraying a rarefied talent at work. Ultimately, she succeeds in creating a character who is obviously a near-genius, but who would not look out of place as the housewife-next-door.

Succinctly, she encapsulates Patsy Cline’s paradoxical unity.

The foil, emcee, comedian, raconteur and lynchpin for this show is Little Big Man, played with customary expertise and panache by Justin Tate. This actor exudes the precision and imagination of a professional — his DJ is by turns hilarious, informative and entertaining. There are Choric features to his character — nostalgically reminding us of a world in which Bobby Kennedy might be running for President and in which Mickey Mantle’s $100,000 salary seemed enormous.

His reading of commercials is great fun — I will never see Ajax cleaner in the same way again, and he accurately portrays the risqué, suggestive humor of early 1960’s Las Vegas. The moment when he reads the wire service report of Cline’s death might be slowed down a little; Tate is a fine actor who could negotiate a distinct transformation into the tragically dramatic here.

The backing band is laid back, especially those doyens of coolness Bill De Levan on bass and Cody Tumlin on drums. I could imagine them shooting the breeze with Dean Martin offstage.

So “A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline” is well worth attending. Those who were fans of the singer all those years ago are offered oodles of nostalgia. Younger people are engrossed by a vanished time in which country music was primetime on network television and foot long tassels were the epitome of style.